Timeline for How much margin does a U.S. Democratic President need? [duplicate]
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23 events
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| Jul 18, 2021 at 23:39 | history | edited | JJJ♦ |
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| Mar 4, 2020 at 20:54 | comment | added | user29681 | Sure. But my point is that it technically doesn't matter. It is mathematically possible to not even get over 50% of the national popular vote and still win. That is all I'm trying to point out. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 19:20 | comment | added | gerrit | @Chipster Just because it is possible to win the electoral college with 0.00001% of the popular vote does not mean there is no correlation. If you consider all election outcomes that are theoretically possible, then calculate the PV and EV result for all, you will get a positive correlation. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 19:17 | comment | added | gerrit | @Chipster The claim that the popular vote has nothing to do with the electoral vote is factually incorrect. The popular vote within each state determines which candidate gets to send people to the electoral college, so mathematically, the overall popular vote must necessarily correlate positively with the electoral vote. To claim anything else is mathematically incorrect. No amount of outliers can mathematically reduce this correlation to 0 or make it negative (but it can be arbitrarily close to 0). | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 18:24 | comment | added | user29681 | As others have mentioned, the popular vote has nothing to do with the electoral college, and, in fact, the amount needed to win the electoral college can theoretically be quite small. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 18:20 | comment | added | gerrit | I'm not moving the goalposts at all. Rick quickly pointed out that my question was a duplicate (thanks!), the linked question has answers that perfectly answer my question, backed up by solid research, the single existing answer to this post does not address my question and is factually incorrect. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 17:19 | comment | added | hszmv | +Consider flipping a coin... we know that it has a 50:50 chance that one face will land up... but when we actually do it, it's possible to get three flips face up in a row because each flip is not dependent on the previous. 2000 and 2004 are WAY different in politics and you can point to a major instance of why just from one book. The similarity is true for every sufferage grant, which will have a wildly different factor to consider, but because states can delegate electors however they please, even unjustly so, it doesn't affect the EC like you think it does. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 17:16 | comment | added | hszmv | The best you can do is look at several predictive algorithms for this coming election, which predicts Trump winning with more electoral college votes than in 2016 under any turn out that is not historically large by the records. There is no way to simulate accurately better than that, but if you use all available conditions, for every 10 elections, the 10th election will get a PV/EC split in 9 times out of 10. But since all options to get the split are possible in each election, it will come up seemingly more frequently in some times+ | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 17:11 | comment | added | hszmv | @gerrit: And what you fail to realize is that by moving the goal posts like this is throwing out data and making it more difficult to answer this question to what you are claiming is something that can satisfy you. And if you want a million election simulation perfectly modeled so that all issues and cultural zeit geists are accurately reflected for a time period of 4 million years (1 election per year) you're not asking for a reasonable time considering that it not only is a longer period of time than man has walked the earth, but is twice the time that the entire Homo genius has as well.+ | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 16:56 | comment | added | gerrit | @hszmv See Voting rights in the United States for a summary of the history. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 16:52 | comment | added | gerrit | @hszmv Before 1965, the USA (either nationwide or in certain states) restricted (de facto or de jure) suffrage to certain groups. The further back you go, the more severely restricted this was. An election where certain groups are excluded is not a democratic election. I am surprised this would be considered a controversial or debatable statement. Surely you wouldn't call a white-only (longer ago: white men only, longer ago yet: white land owning men only) election democratic?! | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 16:48 | comment | added | hszmv | @gerrit: So we've been living under a dictatorship prior to 1965? Okay, sure... whatever your trying to argue, it's through the lens of a very negative read and you're clearly not interested in learning but demanding validation for your warped denailist history. I'm done talking with you. Come back when you read a basic history book. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 16:20 | comment | added | gerrit | @hszmv Actually, pollsters must have run Monte Carlo simulations for they came up with probabilities of a Clinton win, which are of course hard to validate (if they said Trump had a 10% chance of winning, were they wrong?). This page cites simulations that were used as evidence that struck down Pennsylvania gerrymandering, such simulations can be used to model how "unfair" the EV (currently) is; this is fully missing from the only existing answer. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 16:14 | comment | added | gerrit | @hszmv I don't know if anyone has applied such Monte Carlo simulations to model voter dynamics and its impact on EV vs. PV discrepancies, but to base it past on historical election results the large majority of which are entirely irrelevant would be useless — there weren't even any nationwide democratic elections in the USA before 1965! | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 16:12 | comment | added | gerrit | @hszmv A. Bakkers answer of no correlation is trivially incorrect. Of course there is a correlation between popular vote and electoral vote, but the correlation is smaller than 1. See also the discussion in chat I've had with A. bakker. 2 of those 5 have happened in the last 20 years, and based on recent polling data, it is possible to simulate a million election results to calculate at what PV margin the likelihood of losing EV is below 2 sigma. This depends on which party is ahead. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 16:05 | comment | added | hszmv | @gerrit: But by omitting Republican popular wins and plurality wins, you're ignoring data that supports the A. bakker's answer of no corelation. Clinton was a majority popular winner, but he got 270 Electoral votes, so he's President. Additionally, the lose Popular vote win Electoral scenario has happened in five elections out of the the 58 held over the nations 229 year history (from the adoption of the Constitution) and a disputed possible 6th that will probably never be resolved. 91% of the time the PV and EC have had the same person win. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 15:52 | comment | added | gerrit | @hszmv I focussed on Democratic popular vote wins, because in recent history only Democrats have won popular vote while losing electoral college vote. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 15:49 | comment | added | hszmv | It's curious that you skip the 2004 election and the 1992 and 1994 elections (The latter two Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote (Republicans George H.W. Bush ('92) and Bob Dole ('96) lost in several states because third party spoiler Ross Perot (both elections) split the voters favoring Republican candidates, but not a majority but did win a majority of the Electoral College). Clinton received ~42% and ~49% of the popular vote in the respective years. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 11:32 | history | closed |
gerrit CommunityBot |
Duplicate of How likely is it for a Democrat to win the Presidency if he/she gets 52.8% of the (popular) vote? [closed] | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 10:50 | comment | added | Rick Smith | Probably a duplicate of How likely is it for a Democrat to win the Presidency if he/she gets 52.8% of the (popular) vote?, which was closed as off-topic. | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 10:35 | history | edited | gerrit | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 11 characters in body
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| Mar 4, 2020 at 10:34 | answer | added | A.bakker | timeline score: 3 | |
| Mar 4, 2020 at 10:26 | history | asked | gerrit | CC BY-SA 4.0 |